Braun steels for intraparty battles

“When the farm crisis hit in the early 1980s, the enterprise nearly went under,” the Indianapolis Star reports. “Braun steered the business toward the more lucrative direction of selling truck accessories — bed liners, running boards and other products used to trick out trucks. By the arrival of the new millennium, the business exploded, going from 15 employees to more than 300. Eventually, Braun expanded to warehousing and shipping. Today, Meyer Distributing operates in 35 states and employs more than 850 workers, 450 in Indiana.”

When he ran for Senate in 2018, Braun leaned into his record as a successful businessman and self-made multimillionaire. In one campaign ad, he even donned casual garb and posed alongside cardboard cut-outs of his two Republican primary opponents, both congressmen, in their suits — and asked voters: “Can you pick out the businessman?”

It’s little surprise, then, that pro-business, free-market economics was a defining feature of Braun’s campaign agenda.

But some segments of the Republican Party and the conservative movement more broadly have shifted dramatically since Braun was first elected to the House in 2014. There is a growing faction on the Right that opposes “free-market dogma” and counsels government intervention in pursuit of conservative ends. It has manifested itself in the rise of populist voices such as Tucker Carlson in the media, the launch of new government-friendly conservative think tanks such as American Compass, and the election of populist Republican politicians such as Sen. Josh Hawley.

A popular assumption is that this is the future of the GOP, especially if President Trump loses reelection and the Right is sent leaderless into the minority. But Mike Braun isn’t on board with that.

In a sit-down interview with the Washington Examiner at his Senate office, the freshman senator acknowledged that Republicans need to evolve on issues as varied as climate change, criminal justice reform, and foreign policy, but emphatically rejected the efforts of some in the conservative movement to discard the party’s fiscally conservative foundation. Instead, he thinks that on key issues such as healthcare, Republicans need to offer up free-market solutions now more than ever.

“The high cost of healthcare and the dysfunction of the system that delivers it is the No. 1 issue,” he said. “We, as Republicans, generally are slow to figure out what we’re going to do with critical issues. And, generally, we are too heavily invested, for whatever reason, in a point of view that’s not resonating.”

“Through Obamacare and even through the present, we kind of forgive the healthcare industry or call them ‘free enterprise’ when [it’s not],” Braun continued. “I would as much as anyone know what ‘free enterprise’ [really] means. I’ve lived it my entire life. I come from a classic background of economics education. Free enterprise means you embrace competition, you’re for full transparency, [and] you do not try to engineer barriers to entry in your markets.”

He told the Washington Examiner that the healthcare industry hardly resembles a free market at all, saying it’s more like an “unregulated utility.”

“Basically, the industry has its way,” the senator went on. “And that’s why [healthcare] costs twice as much here as across the developed world.”

Braun argues that this is not merely a fight over principle and purity: If changes aren’t made, momentum will continue to build toward more and more government intervention until we have a de facto socialist system.

“If we as conservatives don’t hold the industry accountable, we’ll get the Bernie plan,” he said, referring to socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders, a leading light of Democratic Party policy formation and supporter of single-payer, government-run healthcare. “Otherwise, we’re going to be disregarded on the issue that is the No. 1 issue out there for consumers, individuals, and business owners.”

“Republicans could pull the biggest coup off in conservative history if we reform healthcare,” Braun argued. “If you did comprehensive healthcare price transparency, it would cascade through the system, just like LASIK [eye] surgery has, which is the only part that is completely free-market and is down 80-90% in cost from what it was 15 years ago.”

In another unorthodox twist, Braun’s second priority issue area is addressing climate change. He was the first Republican to join the Senate’s bipartisan Climate Solutions Caucus.

Braun told me he thinks Republicans must address the issue of climate change from a pro-business, free-market perspective — or risk being circumvented on the issue. Braun thinks not engaging means losing the next generation of young conservative voters, as well as farmers and evangelicals, who he says are increasingly expressing concern over the environment.

“We as Republicans have been too aligned with ‘it’s a hoax,’” he said. “We ought to be willing to at least look honestly at the evidence that’s in front of us and participate in the conversation, so we don’t get a Green New Deal hoisted upon us.”

Braun’s legislative proposals to address climate change include bipartisan bills such as the Growing Climate Solutions Act, which would use the Department of Agriculture to help farmers and other agricultural producers navigate a voluntary carbon credit program to raise capital by reducing their emissions.

“The Green New Deal is crazy talk, a nonstarter,” Braun lamented. “There’s no way we could pay for it.” Which is why, just as with healthcare, he thinks Republicans should get in the game and have a say in how certain aspects of it are addressed.

The senator’s position on climate change stems from one of his key priorities: restoring fiscal restraint to Washington, D.C., and getting the national debt under control. Braun admitted with a sad chuckle that it’s not a popular issue in the Senate these days, but he remains adamant in his support for spending cuts to address runaway deficits.

The senator cited the record-setting $3 trillion-and-counting anticipated budget deficit for this year and the projections that we’ll now pass a potentially disastrous debt-to-size-of-the-economy ratio as soon as 2021. Braun decried the “financial calamity” of “where we’re going to be as a federal government if we keep merrily walking down the road that we’re on.”

“Only three or four of us [in the Senate] really think that’s something to be concerned with,” he lamented. “I understand how critical it is, from being part of private enterprise over the years. Nowhere else can you get by with what you get away with here in Washington.”

Braun shook his head when asked about the new “nationalist conservatives,” including a few members of his caucus who want to take a populist approach to big government spending with a right-wing bent.

“It’ll get confusing to differentiate yourselves from the Democrats, who believe in using the government for everything,” Braun said dismissively. “Once we go down that slippery slope, it still [prompts] the question: How are we going to pay for that?”

“If they’re wanting to chart a course that involves the federal government even more, simply because it aligns with things they want to get done, then I don’t think they’re steeped enough in classic finance and conservative economics,” he continued. “They’ll go down the same trail that the Democrats will.”

So will any action toward fiscal restraint actually happen anytime soon?

Even if Trump wins reelection, Braun says he’s “not at all confident” that it would. He does hope that a second-term Trump, free of the pressures of reelection, would be more willing to brave the politically treacherous terrain of slashing spending and reforming entitlements. Braun made it clear he would hope to guide the president in a more fiscally conservative direction on these issues.

But what if Joe Biden wins?

Then, Braun says he will not just seek to oppose the Democrats, but also strive to offer “another option, a counterpoint” on the issues.

“I’ve always believed that Democrats outmaneuver us on identifying the issues,” he said. “They get out early, and their exuberance and belief in [big government] means they start crafting crazy ideas there’s no way you can pay for.” That, he says, is where he and others have to “weigh in as a Republican, a classic conservative, as to how we might try a different alternative that’s actually got a way of working in the long run.”

But for Braun, that doesn’t mean solely traditional conservative orthodoxy. I asked the senator about the much-debated question of whether the GOP should stick with Reagan-era fusionism — social conservatism and free-market libertarian economics paired with a hawkish foreign policy — or if it needs to evolve in the Trump era.

Braun wants to maintain the first two planks, “but not the hawkish foreign policy.”

“Defense is the most important thing we do,” he said. “But it’s defense, not offense.”

“We have to have a great defense, but don’t get entangled in stuff that we can’t win,” Braun said. He agrees with “what Trump has done in terms of signaling that we’re not going to be embroiled in Iraq and Afghanistan.”

“We can’t police the world,” the senator surmised. “We cannot afford it.”

In bringing even his support for Trump’s new era of Republican foreign policy back to fiscal principles, Braun sums up his senatorial worldview in a nutshell. The Indiana senator is open to reworking the GOP’s stance on some key issues to appeal to new voters and reflect new realities. But he’s not budging an inch on the GOP’s underlying foundation of free-markets and fiscal responsibility.

Brad Polumbo (@Brad_Polumbo) is the Eugene S. Thorpe fellow at the Foundation for Economic Education and a Washington Examiner contributor.